Rabbi Yoel H. Kahn Congregation Beth El, Berkeley, California

The Kedusha of Homosexual Relationships

Central Conference of American Rabbis' Convention Cincinnati, Ohio, May 26, 1989 CCAR Yearbook XCIV [1989]

This was presented at the plenary session of the annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. At the time, I was the rabbi of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav of San Francisco, a Reform synagogue with a special outreach to gay and lesbian Jews, their friends, families and community. The essay has been republished and reprinted in a variety of settings over the years.

I am deeply honored by this opportunity to address our Conference and am appreciative of the special efforts some of you made in order to be here this morning. Today is a most appropriate date for our consideration of and homosexuality. This convention commemorates the 100th anniversary of the founding of our conference. This year, in fact yesterday, also marked the twentieth anniversary of the modern gay and lesbian liberation movement in this country. Tens and hundreds of thousands marched in cities throughout the country in Freedom Day parades. The congregation I serve, and other members of the World Congress of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations, observed this weekend as Freedom.

My linkage of these two anniversaries may seem inappropriate. But the proximity of their observance can remind us of the common heritage of liberal Judaism and the contemporary struggle for gay and lesbian rights. The pioneering Jewish model of a minority battling for—and securing—civil rights, and then going on to full social and political integration as a distinct community within the general culture, has been an inspiration to many others. Today, gay and lesbian people seek recognition of their humanity and equality, in both the civic and religious realms. To that end, in 1983 the CCAR Committee on Justice and Peace called for our “individual and collective involvement in achieving political, social and religious freedom [for all], regardless of sexual orientation.”1 As we consider the pleas of the gay and lesbian Jews among us, let us remember those of the Jewish people as a whole in years gone by.2

The status of the homosexual in the Jewish community in general, and the rabbinate in particular, is the topic of my paper which you have already received.3 I will limit my remarks this morning, at the request of our Committee's chair, to what is essentially a prior question: can we affirm the place of the homosexual Jew in the synagogue and the Jewish people? Specifically, if the goal of Jewish life is to live in kedushah (sanctity), can we sanctify and bless homosexual relationships without compromising the integrity of our tradition? If we do wish to bless these relationships, can we reconcile this new stand with the historical Jewish teaching in favor of heterosexual, procreative marriage as the normative and ideal form of Jewish family life? This morning, we will examine this question in relation to God, and Israel.

God

I begin with the most fundamental yet unanswerable question: What does God want of us? As a liberal Jew, I am usually reluctant to assert that I know precisely what “God wants.” For me to begin by stating that “God calls us to affirm the sanctity of homosexual relationships” (a statement I believe to be true) would be to assert a privileged claim as little open to dispute as the counter-assertion by Rabbi David Bleich that these relationships today remain to'evah (an abomination).4 How would one respond to such an argument?

Thus, although our assertion of what God wants properly begins our debate, in fact it cannot. Our conclusions about God's expectations of us in a particular matter develop against the background of our unfolding, wider understanding of what God summons us to do—rooted in what we know about God and God's nature. In the foreground is all that we have learned from the scientific disciplines, from universal

Rabbi Yoel H. Kahn The Kedushah of Homosexual Relationships CCAR Yearbook XCIV [1989] ethics, from Jewish tradition, and from our own prayerful conscience. It is when they touch, where the background of what we have already learned of God's expectations of us and God's nature meets foreground of knowledge, prayer, and conscientious reflection about a subject that we may discern God's will.

My teacher Eugene Borowitz writes that he does not hear a clear message from God about homosex- uality, as he has in other areas.5 I differ from Rabbi Borowitz. I believe that we can hear and affirm what God expects of us in this matter. My understanding of what God wants emerges from the background of God's justice and compassion, and is shaped in the foreground by religious interpretation of the insights of modern science. It is this foreground which has changed in recent years and leads me to dissent from the teachings of our received tradition.

The overwhelming consensus of modern science—in every discipline—is that homosexual relations are as “natural” to us as heterosexuality is. Now, to call something “natural” is a descriptive act; what occurs in nature is not inherently good or bad. Assigning of meaning is a religious act. I, along with many others, have come to recognize sexual orientation as a primary, deep part of the human personality, inseparably bound up with the self. Science does not know what creates homosexual attraction in some people, heterosexual attraction in others; yet today we recognize that some people can only be fulfilled in relationships with people of the same sex. What do we say to them? What does God expect of them and of us?

I do not believe that God creates in vain. Deep, heartfelt yearning for companionship and intimacy is not an abomination before God. God does not want us to send the gays and lesbians among us into exile— either cut off from the Jewish community or into internal exile, living a lie for a lifetime. I believe that the time has come, I believe that God summons us to affirm the proper and rightful place of the homosexual Jew—and her or his family—in the synagogue and in the Jewish people.

I cannot prove my claim that homosexuality and the homosexual are an organic part of the divine plan unfolding in nature. I am making a religious faith statement which, like all such statements, requires a leap of faith before its assent but one which is not inconsistent with all that we have learned of the meaning of faith in Judaism. My leap of faith, though, begins on solid ground.6 The premises on which it rests meet the scientific criteria for a probable hypothesis most simply and elegantly explaining the facts and it is consistent with what we learn from our extra-Judaic sources of scientific knowledge. These are the publicly verifiable warrants for my private religious intuition: God does not create in vain. And if God does not create in vain but with purpose, we thwart God's purpose when we turn away from the homosexual Jews who turn to us. I believe, therefore, that God does not want us to discriminate against homosexuals, that lesbian and gay people are created and live b'tzelem Elohim (in God's image); and I do believe that homosexual relationships contribute to, and do not diminish, God's kedushah. Our respon- sibility as Jews is to find a route to the expression of full covenantal fulfillment and responsibility for the homosexual Jew.

The Jew meets God in Torah, and it is to a consideration of kedushah in the light of Torah that we now turn.

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Rabbi Yoel H. Kahn The Kedushah of Homosexual Relationships CCAR Yearbook XCIV [1989]

Torah

When we confront the text honestly, we face a twofold challenge: first, we must dissent from an explicit Biblical injunction which has been in force until modern times. Now, dissenting from Leviticus has not been an obstacle for us before; Reform Judaism has long abandoned the Biblical and rabbinic proscriptions in the area of ritual purity in marriage.7 Robert Kirschner, in his paper which you received, argues convincingly that the Biblical and rabbinic injunctions forbidding male homosexual acts are no longer applicable to the situation of homosexuals today.8 It is important for us to realize that the Biblical authors proscribed particular sexual acts, the motivation for which they could only understand as sinful.

We begin from an entirely different perspective than our ancestors did. If we grant that homosexual acts are not inherently sinful, then can a homosexual relationship be sanctified? When two Jews, graduates of our schools, alumni of our camps and youth movements, members of our synagogues, promise to establish a Jewish home, pledge to live together in faithfulness and integrity, and ask for God's blessing and our own on their union, is this to'evah or is it kedushah?

Do we look at this committed and loving couple from an I-It perspective, which sees a particular act and condemns it, or with I-Thou understanding, which affirms the propriety of sexual intimacy in the context of holistic and enduring relationship? Let me be clear: I do not propose merely that we politely overlook the historical Jewish teaching condemning homosexual behavior, but that we explicitly affirm its opposite: the movement from to'evah to kedushah. This transformation in our Jewish standard, from a specific act to the evaluation of the context in which acts occur, seems to me entirely consistent with Reform Jewish thought and practice.

Many are prepared to affirm that for some Jews, homosexuality is the proper expression of the human need for intimacy and fulfillment. Still, I know that some are reluctant to endorse kiddushin (sanctified covenantal union, usually translated “marriage”) for same sex couples because these relationships apparently disregard the historical and continuing Jewish preference for what Eugene Borowitz and others have called “the procreative family.”9 How can we grant Jewish sanctity, they ask, to a form of family which by its essence precludes procreation, a primary purpose of kiddushin?

My reply has three parts. First, we cannot hold homosexual families to a higher standard than we do heterosexual ones. We do not require proof of fertility or even an intention to become parents before we are willing to marry a heterosexual couple. Is the homosexual couple who uses adoption, artificial insemination or other means to fulfill the Jewish responsibility to parent so different from the heterosexual family who does the same?

Second, does kiddushin require procreation? While Judaism has always had a preference for procreative marriage, our tradition has also validated the possibility that some unions will not produce children. Halachah states that a woman who does not bear children after ten years can be divorced by her husband.10 But the evidence that this law was reluctantly or negligibly enforced is precisely the type of historical example Reform responsa often cite to support the explicit expansion of a value we find implicit in our historical tradition. The Jewish tradition has never insisted that the sole purpose of sexual expression is procreation, as evidenced by the numerous rabbinic discussions on the mitzvah of sexual intimacy and pleasure.11

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Rabbi Yoel H. Kahn The Kedushah of Homosexual Relationships CCAR Yearbook XCIV [1989]

Third, the situation of the gay and lesbian Jews among us points out the need for new categories in our thinking. Reform Judaism is committed to affirming the responsibility of the individual. Can we not teach that a heterosexual relationship is the proper form of kedushah for many and a homosexual relationship may be a proper form for others? Can we not we create a plurality of expressions of covenantal responsibility and fulfillment, and teach that different Jews will properly fulfill their Jewish communal and religious responsibilities in different ways?12

Finally, I would like to introduce into this discussion of Torah a different text than those which have shaped our debate so far. Mine is a classic Jewish text, the record of a uniquely Jewish form of revela- tion—the text of our history. The history of our people, writ large, has been a continuing source of revelation. For our own generation, the recollection of events that we witnessed has assumed the force of Torah, and makes demands upon us as a people and as individual Jews. But our history is not only writ large—history is also written in the small, daily events of our lives. I come then today bearing not only the scrolls of our texts, halachic and aggadic, but also another scroll—the scroll of our people's history. And it too makes claims upon me.

When I arrived to assume my pulpit in San Francisco four years ago, deep down I still believed that gay and lesbian relationships and families, were, somehow, not as real, not as stable, not as committed as heterosexual marriages. I could tell many stories of what I have learned since. There are the two women who have lived together for many years without familial or communal support, who have endured long distances and job transfers because employers thought them both single, and admitting their homosexuality would have endangered their livelihoods, women who have cared for each other without benefit of insurance coverage or health benefits or any legal protection. They came to me one Friday night and simply asked: “Rabbi, this is our twenty-fifth anniversary, will you say a blessing?”

Mine is a synagogue living with AIDS. I have been humbled by the unquestioning devotion of the man who, for more than two years, went to work each morning, calling intermittently throughout the day to check in on his partner, and spent each night comforting, talking, preparing meals, and waking in the middle of the night to carry his loved one to the bathroom. Who would have imagined, when they first chatted twelve years before, that their life together would take this path? The loving caregiver stayed at his partner's side throughout the period of his illness and until his death.

These many lives have taught me about the possibility of enduring loyalty, the meaning of commitment, and the discovery of reservoirs of strength in the face of unimaginable pain and suffering. If the covenant people are summoned to be God-like, then these Jews live their lives b'tzelem Elohim and these relationships are surely of true covenantal worth. Kiddushin is, in Eugene Borowitz's words, “Judaism's preferred condition in which to work out one's destiny ... Because it is a unique fusion of love and demand, of understanding and judgment, of personal giving and receiving, nothing else can teach us so well the meaning of covenant.” If “[i]t is the situation where we are most thoroughly challenged to be a Jew and where ... we may personally exemplify what it means to be allied with God in holiness” then the Torah scroll of lived history records the kedushah of these relationships.13

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Rabbi Yoel H. Kahn The Kedushah of Homosexual Relationships CCAR Yearbook XCIV [1989]

Israel

I would like to conclude with a word about kiddushin and the Jewish people. I have been repeatedly asked, if we elevate homosexual families to an equal status with heterosexual families, will we not undermine the already precarious place of the traditional family? I do not believe that encouraging commitment, stability and openness undermines the institution of family—it enhances it. At present, many gay and lesbian Jews are estranged from the synagogue, the Jewish community and their families of origin because of continued fear, stigma and oppression. Welcoming gay and lesbian families into the synagogue will strengthen all our families, by bringing the exiles home, and by reuniting children, parents and siblings who have been forced to keep their partners and innermost lives hidden. K'lal yisrael (the community and unity of the Jewish people) is strengthened when we affirm that there can be more than one way to participate in the Covenant.

I speak to you today on behalf of many Jews—members of our people, members of our congregations, members of our conference—who are unable to speak themselves. They each seek, as best they are able, to establish a home which will be a mikdash ma'at. The gay and lesbian Jews amongst us seek to live their lives in loyalty to the Covenant and as members of the Covenant people and its community. Turning to us, they offer themselves, their lives and their sacred commitments as stones with which to build the sanctuary of the House of Israel.

Thank you.

1. "Statement of Purpose and Function—Report of the Committee on Justice and Peace" CCAR Yearbook XCIII (New York: CCAR, 1983). 2. This comparison was first suggested by Sanford Ragins in "An Echo of the Pleas of our Ancestors" CCAR Journal 20:3 [1973]. Throughout European history "the fate of Jews and gay people has been almost identical" (John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality [Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980], p. 15). Although often unmentioned or ignored in Holocaust commemorations and studies, homosexuals in Nazi Germany were beaten in the streets, sent to camps, enslaved and killed. 3. Yoel H. Kahn, "Judaism and Homosexuality" Homosexuality, the Rabbinate, and Liberal Judaism: Papers prepared for the Ad-Hoc Committee on Homosexuality and the Rabbinate [New York: CCAR, New York, 1989]. 4. J. David Bleich, Judaism and Healing: Halakhic Perspectives [New York: Ktav, 1981], p. 69. 5. Eugene B. Borowitz, "On Homosexuality and the Rabbinate, a Covenantal Response" Homosexuality, the Rabbinate, and Liberal Judaism: Papers prepared for the Ad-Hoc Committee on Homosexuality and the Rabbinate [New York: CCAR, 1989], p. 2. 6. See Milton Steinberg, "The Common Sense of Religious Faith" Anatomy of Faith [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960] pp. 80 ff. 7. E.g., niddah and shefichat zerah. 8. Robert Kirschner, "Halakhah and Homosexuality: A Reappraisal" Judaism 37:4 [Fall 1988] reprinted in Homosexuality, the Rabbinate, and Liberal Judaism: Papers prepared for the Ad-Hoc Committee on Homosexuality and the Rabbinate [New York: CCAR, 1989], p. 2. 9. Borowitz, op. cit., p. 9. 10. Yevamot 64a; EH 154:6. 11. See David Feldman, Marital Relations, Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law (New York: Schocken, 1968), chaps. 2,4,5 passim, esp. pp. 65-71, 103-105. 12. Consider the Centenary Perspective's statement on aliyah: "We encourage aliyah for those who wish to find maximum personal fulfillment in the cause of Zion." Eugene Borowitz, Reform Judaism Today (New York: Behrman House, 1978), p. xxiii. 13. Eugene Borowitz, Liberal Judaism (New York: UAHC, 1984), pp. 448-9. This section ("Accepting the Single Jew") begins, "It will not do, however, to give the impression that one must be married to be a good Jew."

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